Mastodonia

THIRTEEN

I was washing the supper dishes when Ben Page came knocking at the kitchen door.

“I see you’re alone again,” said Ben.

“Rila went east for a few days. She’ll be back.”

“You say the two of you were on a dig together, years ago.”

“That’s right. Turkey. A small ruin that dated back. to the Bronze Age. It wasn’t much of a dig. Nothing new, nothing exciting. The sponsors were disappointed.”

“I suppose you can do a lot of digging sometimes and come up with nothing.”

“That is true,” I said. I put away the last of the dishes, wiped my hands and sat down at the kitchen table, across from Ben. In his corner, Bowser whimpered eagerly, his feet twitching as he chased dream rabbits.

“This digging you been doing,” said Ben. “Turning up much?”

“Not yet. Nothing that amounts to much.”

“But it isn’t just a sinkhole.”

“No, not a sinkhole. I don’t know what it is. Maybe a meteorite. Found some stray chunks of metal.”

“Asa,” said Ben accusingly, “you’re not leveling with me. There is something going on.”

“What makes you say that, Ben?”

“Hiram. He’s acting mysterious. As if you were on to something and he was in on it. Says he can’t talk about it; that he promised not to. He makes a joke about it. Says to ask Bowser.”

“Hiram thinks he can talk with Bowser.”

“I know. He talks with everything.”

“Hiram’s all right,” I said. “But you can’t depend on him. He talks a lot of nonsense.”

“I don’t think so, not this time. The whole thing is a little strange. You coming back and buying the farm and digging in the sinkhole. Then Rila shows up and she’s an archaeologist, just like you.”

“If there was anything to tell you, Ben, I would.

There’s nothing now, maybe never will be.”

“Look,” said Ben, “as mayor of this town, I have a right to ask. If you are up to something that might affect the town, I should know ahead of time. So we can get ready for it.”

“Ben, I don’t know what you are getting at.”

“Well, for example, I own ten acres at the edge of town. Foreclosed on it some years ago, been paying taxes on it ever since. Good place for a motel. There ain’t but this one flytrap of a motel here. No self-respecting person would put up in it. Money in a motel, if it’s a good one and there are people who would want to use it. If something should happen that would bring a lot of people here, a motel would be a good business venture.”

“What did Hiram say that made you think there might be people coming here?”

“Well, not a great deal. He acts so damn mysterious and important. He enjoys it so much I figure it must be something big. He did let one thing sort of slip without knowing it. Asa, tell me, could there be a crashed spaceship at the bottom of the sinkhole?”

“I suppose there could be,” I said. “That’s one thought I’ve had in mind. But nothing so far to support it. If there is, it would have to be an alien spaceship. One operated by intelligent people from way out in space, from another star. If you found fragments of such a ship and could show credible evidence, it would be an important find. It would be the first real evidence that there was another thinking race in the universe and that, at some time, they had visited the Earth.”

Ben whistled softly. “That would bring a lot of people here, wouldn’t it? People to study it. A lot of curiosity seekers. And they’d come year after year. It could be a tourist attraction that would last for years.”

“I would imagine so,” I said.

“It’s slow going for you,” said Ben. “Out there digging by yourself. How about me getting some of the boys together and coming out to help you.”

“I appreciate the thought, but it wouldn’t work. This kind of digging takes training. You’ve got to know what to look for. You have to take it easy and plot exactly where you found each item. You can’t just rush in there and start throwing dirt. Get a gang in with picks and shovels and they’d destroy a lot of evidence. Little things that wouldn’t mean a thing to them, but would to a trained digger.”

Ben nodded gravely. “Yes, I can see how it would be. It was just a thought.”

“I thank you for it,” I said. “And, Ben, I’d appreciate it if you said nothing of it. It would be embarrassing to me if the word got out I was digging for a spaceship. The town would think I was crazy, and the word would filter out into academic circles and there’d be a lot of university types shooting off their faces, and some of them would be coming out to look the situation over, and most of them, I suspect, would sneer at us.”

“Sure,” said Ben. “Not a word from me. Not a single word from me. But do you think there could be …”

“I’m not sure at all. Just a hunch. Based on some evidence that may be no evidence at all. I may be doing no more than making a fool of myself. How about a beer?”

After Ben had left, I sat at the table for a long time, wondering if what I’d told him had been wise. it could backfire, I knew, but probably not with Ben. He was a grasping bastard and would probably keep his mouth shut because he’d want to be the first to know. so that he could rush in, ahead of all the others, and get his motel built — and probably other things that he had not mentioned.

I’d had to tell him something, and I’d had to throw him slightly off the track. Just a plain denial would not have satisfied him. Hiram’s slip of the tongue and the way that he was acting had made Ben suspicious.

And I hadn’t really lied to him, I told myself. There was a spaceship out there at the bottom of the sinkhole.

I’d probably shut him up, for a time at least. And that was important, for village gossip and speculation had to be kept to a minimum at the moment. Once we started building the fence, of course, there’d be no stopping it. And Rila was right; we would need the fence.

I went to the refrigerator and got another beer.

Goodness, I thought, sitting there drinking it, the entire thing was mad. Much as I might tell myself, in moments of clarity and right thinking, it was not possible for men to travel into time, I knew it was. Imprinted on my mind as nothing else in my entire life, was the memory of that big bull mastodon, with his rapid, almost gliding tread, and his trunk swinging like a pendulum between his tusks as he hurried to reach the herd. And I could not forget the terror I had felt when I realized where I was, the lostness and displacement.

Once again, I ran through the preliminary plans Rila and I had made, sitting at this very table. Thinking of the plans, I felt not only a vague unreality, but some apprehension as well. There could be so much that we had not been able to foresee, blind spots prone to wrecking the best-laid plans. What, I wondered, had we overlooked? What unsuspected circumstances would arise to plague us in the days to come?

I was bothered by how we planned to use time travel. If I had ever thought of it at all, I would not have thought of it as Rila did. I found it difficult to brush aside the conviction that time travel should be used in the furtherance of science and of understanding; that it was not something to be offered in the Marketplace.

But Rila was undoubtedly right in saying that if someone else had found the secret and possessed the technique, they, for their part, would use it to their own best advantage. In her opinion, it was silly to throw away an opportunity to place travel into time on a sound economic basis; for only with such a basis could it be used consistently for research.

In his corner, the dreaming Bowser yipped wildly as he closed in on the rabbit I finished my beer, threw the bottle in the trash can and went off to bed; Rila was coming home tomorrow and I’d have to get up early to drive to Minneapolis and meet her at the airport,